TV Quote of the Day (‘Veep,’ As Her Personal Trainer Offers to ‘Normalfy’ a Speech)

Vice President Selina Meyer [played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus] [to speechwriter Mike McLintock]: “I want to talk to you about this speech for the World War I service, okay?”

Mike McLintock [played by Matt Walsh]: “Very proud of it, ma'am. I gave this one 100% effort. [pauses] As I do everything I write for you.”

Selina: “Okay, I'm not sure about this... ‘To honor all who fell in frozen Flanders Fields and hold their memory fresh.’ It's just a little bit too ‘F-fy’ for me, you know?”

Mike: “Well, that's kind of the idea, ma'am. I mean, it's poetic.”

Campaign manager Dan Egan [played by Matt Walsh]: “Yeah, but we're trying to appeal to the blue-collar demographic, right? Not the poets.”

[Having been sliding around in the background, Selina’s personal trainer and lover, Ray Whelans, hired by Dan to “relax” Selina for her Presidential campaign, suddenly moves to the front.]

Ray Whelans [played by Christopher Meloni]: “I agree.” [Ray takes paper, starts reading speech aloud.]  “So... ‘16 million perished.’ No, they didn't. They died, so just say that. ‘The loss, though impossible to adequately comprehend...’ That sentence is impossible to comprehend. Just say, ‘hard to understand,’ you know? Plain English.”

Dan: “I kind of agree.”

Ray [helpfully, to Mike]: “I could ‘normalfy’ this for you.”

Mike [horrified]: “No. No, no.”

Selina [to Mike]: “No, no, no. Just listen. He's got sort of a working-class touch, which is something that's valuable, and we should listen to it….”

Ray: “So, Mike, what's your favorite part of this speech?”

Mike: “Okay. This is like Gettysburg. ‘Beneath the...’ [Annoyed, tries to disentangle some wires tying him to Ray] ‘Beneath the dark soil of Passchendaele, 100,000 bodies still lie unaccounted for. Let today be their funeral service and we their mourners.’"

Ray: “How about this? ‘There's a whole lotta guys who never came home. Good guys. Here's to those guys.’”

White House Chief of Staff Ben Cafferty [played by Kevin Dunn] “Holy f-----g Christ. What is that, Ray?”

Ray: “I'm just spitballin'.”— Veep, Season 3, Episode 7, “Special Relationship,” original air date May 18, 2014, teleplay by Simon Blackwell and Tony Roche, directed by Becky Martin 

Photo of the Day: Peggy Noonan at Books and Greetings, Northvale, NJ

Thursday night, I drove to see conservative columnist Peggy Noonan, who has been on a tour promoting her collection of speeches and articles over the last 30 years, The Time of Our Lives. 

At Books and Greetings, a bookstore in Northern New Jersey, however, her appearance had something like the feeling of a welcome-home party: through much of her youth, she had grown up in Rutherford; she graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson University in the early 1970s; and at least several well-wishers from those days (including a brother) were in the audience.

I arrived about 15 minutes late for the start of her talk before the book-signing. All the seats were taken up front, and, among people waiting for her to sign their books, I was #56. I stood halfway in the back of the store, craning my neck and listening hard as she spoke.

I do not agree with all of Noonan’s positions; indeed, unlike many in the audience, I don’t think I agree with even half of them. But I found her account of working in the Reagan Administration, What I Saw at the Revolution, a political memoir of uncommon wit and verve, and her “Declarations” column is the first thing I turn to in each Saturday edition of The Wall Street Journal.

Unlike much of the conservative wing of the Republican Party, her criticism of Barack Obama is informed by sincere, thoughtful disagreement over his philosophy of government rather than by conspiratorial nonsense about what he is not, and her best work reflects her firsthand knowledge of the ideals and compromises made by those in government.

In the image accompanying this post, she is signing my copy of The Time of Our Lives and another book, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech With Style, Substance, and Clarity. 

(As someone whose work over the years has occasionally required writing speeches, I was intrigued by the latter—and, indeed, it looks as if my curiosity has paid off; after I got home, I marveled at her astute, line-by-line reading of Earl Charles Spencer’s eulogy for his sister, Princess Diana, and why Ms. Noonan felt, eight years into the decade, that it might be “so far the only great speech of the 1990s.”)

Before signing books for the eager throng assembled, Ms. Noonan answered a variety of questions from the audience, including:

*What was it like to work for Ronald Reagan? (She felt “lucky” to have her speeches delivered by a man who had used his voice professionally, in acting and in politics, for 40 years, and that she had never felt that “a good man can also be a great man” until she worked for him.)

*Who were her literary influences? (Like mine, American novelists of the Twenties and Forties—notably Hemingway—and, a rediscovery of hers in recent years, the poet Robert Frost.)

*What did she think of Donald Trump? (She, like so many others, did not think he would enter the race, but did not dismiss his chances after his announcement because he had “hit a nerve on illegal immigration” with GOP primary voters. Still, she noted, his candidacy was not without dangers: “People ask me, ‘Can he win the nomination?’ Yes, he can. Or they’ll ask, ‘Can he split the party?’ Yes, he can.”)

Many progressive readers (including a number of those who read this blog) may wonder why I admire a writer with whom I often disagree with so profoundly. It’s simple, really: Ms. Noonan writes like an angel, and, in my view, that forgives a lot.

Not that, when you get down to it, she has anything to be forgiven for. In a time of angry polarization, Ms. Noonan writes with civility, a spirit that should be returned in kind. As Thomas Jefferson noted in his first Inaugural Address: “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.”

Quote of the Day (Peggy Noonan, on Applause in State of the Union Speeches)

“[I]n the 1960s network anchors started noting how many times the president was ‘interrupted by applause’ [in the State of the Union address]. This made everyone in every White House since want to get their guy more applause than the previous guy. Congressmen pop up and down like manic gophers in an attempt to show support. A president is left standing up there for an hour and 20 minutes with the blood starting to pool in his calves and a look on his face that says, ‘I really want to look like I’m interested in what I’m saying, but we’re 22 minutes in and I’m just thinking about dinner.’ They eat lightly before the speech. They are hungry after.”— Peggy Noonan, “Declarations: How to Continue the Obama Upswing,” The Wall Street Journal, January 21, 2011

Those who can recall this weekend’s column by Peggy Noonan, in which she expressed the notion that Americans have stopped listening to President Obama, will likely think that the above article title is a misprint. But note the date: 2011. She turned out, at least in this instance, to display some shrewdness about the turn in his fortunes that would bring about his reelection.

But I’m not recalling that earlier column to show what a difference three years can make (her columns about Obama have become increasingly predictable: she's--surprise, surprise!--against him), but rather to highlight that she has caught onto something that people of all political stripes can recognize as true: the often-empty showmanship of State of the Union addresses. As policy pronouncements, they have become statements by committee, with everything of interest written by some poor scribe bleached of all vigor by some Cabinet undersecretary. Most of the time, it’s what Clinton speechwriter (and my college classmate) Michael Waldman accurately termed, in a fascinating interview on PBS in 2000, “very pre-scripted, stately symphonies.” 

Even when the President picks an individual out of the audience (a tradition begun by Noonan’s beloved old boss, Ronald Reagan), it’s not enough to enliven an address of such interminable length. “Imagine,” writes former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau in a post on "The Daily Beast", “if a friend asked you to sit quietly for nearly an hour while he spoke with great detail and flourish about his many plans for the year ahead. Probably not, right?” (And this is a piece that still sees some benefit from these addresses!)

(The Waldman interview, by the way, reminded me of the first hint of partisan rudeness in the audience in these affairs. Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst at Obama in the 2009 address—“You lie!”—earned him a censure vote from the House of Representatives, along largely partisan lines. Yet 16 years before that, a Newt Gingrich-led GOP had erupted in laughter at Bill Clinton’s call for campaign-finance reform. I did not agree with much of Clinton’s subsequent behavior in the Oval Office, but his improvised retort on this occasion-- "You know they're not laughing at home"—was as well-merited as it was effective.)

The New Republic has just come out with a list of the best State of the Union addresses, according to a panel of historians. But what strikes me, however, is how paradoxical the results are. 

A couple of the historians cited Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 address, in which he declared the War on Poverty and put the full backing of his office behind his epochal civil-rights program. But, in watching some of it on C-Span this weekend, I found his delivery dull and earnest, and understood why Kennedy aides had once derided him behind his back as “Uncle Cornpone.” It displayed not one iota of the powerful one-on-one “Johnson treatment” he used to convert recalcitrant legislators to his way of thinking. (To understand the full nature of this—including private pictures of him boring in, for all he's worth, on the overmatched Senator Theodore Green—see this post on the site “Dead Presidents,” by blogger Anthony Bergen.)

On the other hand, an address that surely must rank on any short list of the most rhetorically powerful addresses ever given by a President was also one of the most misconceived in terms of its intention. I’m talking about Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 State of the Union address, one whose closing still thrills me—and, I suspect, many students of the Presidency—to read:

“Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.”

But what was this measure the President called “plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless”? A constitutional amendment authorizing voluntary colonization of blacks back to Africa and compensated emancipation for their slave masters. The proposal was uncharacteristically naïve of the normally politically surefooted Lincoln: Slaves and freedmen would not want to be wrenched from a land in which, for all its faults, they had put down roots, and even slaveholders in states that had stayed in the Union were proving resistant to any notion of manumitting their enormously lucrative properties. (You can read my analysis of the reasons for Lincoln’s bold move—and why it failed—in this prior post.)